Indiana University removed Venus’ fish from Showalter Fountain last week. According to the university, this evacuation was to prevent students from stealing the fish if IU wins the College Football National Championship on Monday night.
In a statement to the Indiana Daily Student on the removal, a university spokesperson pointed to a decades-long tradition of students going fishing at Showalter, stretching back to the men’s basketball national championship in 1987. After IU won, the first fish disappeared. In 2000, students carried another one of the several hundred-pound sculptures over a mile to Memorial Stadium to protest the firing of IU men’s basketball coach Bob Knight. Two more of the fish were swiped before graduation in 2013.
But there was no need for these fish to lie low this time. President Pamela Whitten, these sea creatures were safe.
Since the 1990s, every time-honored measure of hooliganism has plummeted. In the United States and across the developed world, members of Gen Z drink less, smoke less, and have less sex. In the same vein, illicit drug usage has declined among younger Americans after an all-time high in the early 1980s. In 1987, when the first fish was stolen, an estimated 27% of high school seniors had used an illicit substance beside marijuana. In 2024, just 10% had.
In short, today’s youth are “better behaved and less hedonistic,” as the Economist puts it. Young people are also “lonelier and more isolated” than they ever were. Hence Great Britain, once a country of pubs, has shuttered roughly 1,000 of them in the past five years because younger people everywhere are no longer going out. In 2023, just 4.1% of American adults under the age of 34 had “attended or hosted” a party some time during that year.
Francis Fukuyama was right to suggest we’ve arrived at the end of history — only, it’s the end of social, not political, history. When Fukuyama published “The End of History and the Last Man” in the 1990s, 3% of Americans reported having no close friends. In 2025, researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School found that number had quadrupled to 12%.
I’d wager that national championship hijinks have become just as stone-aged as the rest of youthful mischief. I doubt a crowd large enough to carry away one of the fish, much less deliver it to Memorial Stadium, could amass today, like it did in 2000. When I was a high school senior touring IU in May 2024, the sight of about 100 students gathered in Dunn Meadow — there as part of a pro-Palestinian encampment demonstration — amazed me. However, thousands of students used to fill Dunn Meadow in political protest throughout the 1960s. Students are not banding together for shared causes like they did decades ago, and it seems their power to come together for any cause only decreases year after year.
But if a group of students did take one of the fish, I’d be glad to be mistaken. I foresee numerous advantages to IU if a fish were discovered to be missing. Compared to a scaly fish, the benefit of a bronze one is that it can generally survive out of water for some time.
Then, in the event this fish returned to Showalter Fountain — another bet I’d take, with just one of the original five still missing after all the times they were snatched — it would create a new legendary story of the kind only a theft or other antic can craft.
A game of cat-and-mouse over a fish statue would lend some much-needed whimsy to our dreadfully-serious university. It’s unfortunate that we live on a campus where staff members, newspapers and dinners can vanish in the middle of the night instead of bronze fish.
So, put the fish back in their pool, IU. Venus needs her friends. No one was going to steal them, anyway. Students are much less inclined to collective activity than they once were, whatever role technology, or the university administration, has played in that. And if one of the fish was found to be on the run the morning after the championship, this would provide an up-and-coming news reporter at the IDS a great caper to uncover.
